


nearly witches

by nymphae



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Practical Magic AU, Witches, kind of, proximity curse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-14
Updated: 2019-10-14
Packaged: 2020-12-14 23:42:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21024164
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nymphae/pseuds/nymphae
Summary: It’s not like Clarke hasn’t done this before— she knows the laws like the back of her hand—but she still gets antsy when the Halloween decorations start to invade all the stores and her human friends start chattering about costumes. There’s beauty in Samhain, in the renewal ritual that she learned at her mother’s knee, but there’s danger, too. They used to tell cautionary tales at gatherings about witches who bumblefucked their reaffirmation with elements and earth, about witches who withered and burned out and died without so much as a mark on the ground. Ghost stories don’t do much for human children once they get older, Clarke knows, but she grew up knowing ghosts are real.





	nearly witches

**Author's Note:**

> Greetings! It's been a long time since I've been active on this site, wow. This fic has been collecting dust in my files for a few years now, but I think it's time to let it see the light of day. I'm not sure I'll continue this, so do let me know if you're interested in seeing more! My influences for this include: practical magic, the love witch, the pagan-ness of Hardy's wessex, and other random stuff.
> 
> Disclaimer: I am ridiculously behind on the show, so get in an early-season-3 mindset for this.
> 
> Thanks for reading.

Let’s be realistic. Clarke Griffin is _far _too busy to be bringing anyone back to her apartment for sex.

She’s a twenty-two-year-old med student. She’s got _classes_. She’s got textbooks to annotate, research to peel through, papers to write, labs to suffer through, finals to cry over, and professors to charm. She even has a study group to keep afloat—and God, after this many years of school, she should _know_ not to agree to a study group. On top of that, she has pleading friends to placate, an overbearing mother to call back, a dead father to visit, and…well, you get the point. On any normal day, a one-night stand is nowhere near the top of her to-do list.

But this isn’t a normal day. If one were to look at the overly cluttered calendar hanging over her desk (she still hasn’t gotten used to using electronic ones and probably never will), one would see the word _Samhain_ written in neat capital letters beneath today’s date.

It’s not like Clarke hasn’t done this before— she knows the laws like the back of her hand—but she still gets antsy when the Halloween decorations start to invade all the stores and her human friends start chattering about costumes. There’s beauty in Samhain, in the renewal ritual that she learned at her mother’s knee, but there’s danger, too. They used to tell cautionary tales at gatherings about witches who bumblefucked their reaffirmation with elements and earth, about witches who withered and burned out and died without so much as a mark on the ground. Ghost stories don’t do much for human children once they get older, Clarke knows, but she grew up knowing ghosts are real.

“Oh, Clarke,” her mother had sighed the year of her awakening. She’d been standing on the patio, holding the house phone to her ear and tapping her foot in impatience. Already evidence of her years of frowning was plain on her face. “You’ll be _fine._ You’re a Griffin.”

Clarke was never so sure. Most of her childhood, pre-awakening, was spent feeling small and insignificant beside fully bloomed witches, girls who could float on puffs of air and make flames burst on their fingertips, girls who could bring stone to tears with their voices and boil water with their breath. When they danced, heads thrown back, feet barely touching the ground, they looked like ghosts in the night, like girls on fire. Clarke and Wells—always alone, the only male witch for the last hundred years—stood alienated on the sidelines, feet itching. They hid their clasped hands in the folds of her dress and _yearned._

In the past, Samhain meant sleepovers with Raven and Wells while their coven went out to complete their rituals, huddling in Clarke’s bedroom with beginners’ grimoires. It used to mean laughing and grinning when the sparks in Raven’s hands turned into flames, when the air puffing around Wells’s head turned into drafts, when the moisture collecting on Clarke’s fingertips turned into torrents of water pulled straight from the air. But things change. Nowadays, taking part in Samhain feels like driving on an icy road at night.

“We’ll do the usual,” Raven insisted three days ago over coffee. She’d looked well-rested and beautiful, where Clarke was sleep-deprived and grimy. To be fair, Raven has been radiant for the last nineteen years and Clarke was living off of caffeine and slightly stale bagels for the past week, so she tried not to take it too harshly. Raven flashed white teeth and leaned back in her seat. “Tomorrow morning we’ll go out to Newport. Mess with tourists. Get drunk. Burn all the shit from the last year.”

“Renewal,” Clarke said with a smile.

“Renewal,” Raven agreed. They clasped hands. The twinned magic under their skin thrummed like electricity between them. It almost felt happy.

This year, Clarke tells herself, won’t be any different than the last three. She’s done everything required of her. She drew the element circle during the golden hour, burned a lock of her hair, and traced the proper runes on each of her palms and over her heart in oil. She repeated the Latin until the words burned and dug into moist black soil with bare hands to remind the earth she’s coming. Now all she needs is the human connection.

She’s sure this boy will do. He’s the only one in the bar who’s not in costume, a normal person amongst maids and pirates and wannabe James Bonds, and Clarke’s drawn to him instantly. He’s young and strong enough; she can feel his vibrancy coming off him in waves. He’ll think the draw on his life force is just a hangover come morning. That’s the best thing about humans: they always refuse to think outside their little worlds.

She steps into the temporarily vacant space at the bar beside him, orders a beer, offers him a smile. He’s nursing hard liquor and a moody air, but he looks at her appreciatively, calls her _princess_ in a way that makes her hate the plastic tiara and blue dress Raven bought her a little less. It’s a half hour of flirting and light drinking before she says, “I live two blocks away from here, you know.”

He looks at her with that familiar glint in his eye. He’s got a smile that pulls Clarke forward, makes her want to feel his heartbeat in her hands. “Is that right?” he says.

The cab ride back to her place is full of knowing smiles and hands on knees, and the elevator doors in her apartment building barely have a chance to close before he’s pushing her up against the wall, kissing her hard and fast. It’s a stumbling rush to get through her door, to get her jacket and his shirt off as fast as possible.

“What did you say your name was?” she gasps.

He pauses, breath heavy. “Bellamy,” he rasps.

She laughs. “I like you, Bellamy,” she says.

She curls a hand at the nape of his neck and pulls him toward her so she can kiss him feverishly, tear the last few layers of clothes between them away. She hasn’t fucked since her last boyfriend, but this reminds her of how much she missed it—missed boys and their little grunts, their hands, and their mouths. She waits until she’s got him locked between her legs and almost undone before getting to the real work. She carefully bites through her lip, teeth sliding through flesh, and yanks him down to bite through his. This is the best part of renewal—mixing blood with a human and feeling a new year’s worth of power surge into her veins. It also makes for great orgasms.

But that’s not what happens. When she tongues their blood together, a painful shock goes through her mouth, hits all the way to her fingers and toes. They pull apart sharply, so fast that he tumbles off the bed and she hits the headboard. They stare at each other in mutual horror, panting.

“You’re not human,” they accuse simultaneously.

Clarke yanks the sheets up to her chin. “What are you?” she demands. “Djinn? Fae?”

“I’m a witch,” he spits, getting to his feet clumsily. “What are _you?_”

A sickening feeling is brewing in the pit of Clarke’s stomach. “Oh no,” she moans. “Oh, fuck.” She slides off the bed, pulling the sheets with her, and yanks up the carpet in one swift movement. The element circle she’d drawn on the floor the night before is glowing, but it’s electric blue. She stares into its soft luminescence, completely dumbfounded. “Gold,” she says. “It should be _gold._”

“Hey,” the guy says. He snaps his fingers and Clarke blinks at him, having fully forgotten that he was standing there. He’s managed to get his jeans on and stands towering over her, arms folded. His scowl alone is offensive. “I asked you a goddamn question.”

Clarke’s temper flares. “I’m a witch, too, you _absolute_ moron,” she hisses. She gathers the sheet around her like a skirt and draws herself up to her full height. “What the hell were you doing in that bar? That’s marked territory.”

His expression remains stony. “I didn’t see your name on it,” he says. She splutters, but he cuts her off by jabbing an index finger at her elemental circle. “What the hell does that mean?”

She balks. “Which coven are you from?” she asks breathlessly. “Why didn’t I—why couldn’t I feel you?” She should be able to catch another witch’s aura a mile away, especially one outside her coven. She should’ve pegged him the second he touched her, far before their blood mixed. She looks at the circle again. Its meaning is beyond her, too, but she knows enough to see its acute wrongness.

“I don’t have one,” he says, and she whips around to look at him in shock.

“You don’t have a coven,” she echoes.

He folds his arms again. “I don’t need one,” he says defensively.

Clarke runs a hand through her tangled hair, mind racing. “This is bad. This is—who knows what kind of repercussions this’ll have?” An even worse thought hits her. “My mother is going to kill me.”

“What are you talking about?” the guy demands. “We’re the same species. What does it matter?”

She gives him a bewildered look. “It’s _Samhain_,” she replies. “Didn’t you take the rites?” But then she realizes he wouldn’t have, not if he’s covenless.

The guy’s lip curls, transforming his features from charming to pissed off. “Screw this,” he says. He pulls on his shirt in one smooth movement. “I came here to complete a ritual, not to get looked down on by high-society witches.” He turns his back on her and starts for the door, with long, stomping strides that he had been shortening for her benefit only twenty minutes ago on the street.

“Wait,” Clarke says, but it’s too late. A sharp pain pierces her under her ribs, yanking her so powerfully that she hits her ottoman and then the ground — hard. Her cry of pain is punctuated by a loud thump as the asshole also kisses the floor.

“What the hell?” he gasps, hand clamped to his chest, and Clarke knows immediately that he felt it, too. Before she can say anything, he lurches to his knees and tries again. This time, he careens backwards into the doorframe and Clarke is dragged forward a whole foot.

_“Stop!”_ she cries.

The sound of tears in her voice gives him pause. He collapses in a heap where he stands, pain etched into his face. “What is this?” he manages.

Clarke’s head is spinning, her stomach churning. It’s all she can do not to throw up her dinner. She swallows thickly. “Repercussions.”

All of Clarke's calls go straight to Raven's voicemail.

After the fourth iteration of Raven's recorded voice (_"Hey you've reached Raven. Leave a message unless you're a telemarketer or Finn_—_in which case, fuck off"_) she gives up. In response to the asshole's aggressively raised eyebrow, she shakes her head. He looks away, mouth tight.

While they wait, Clarke and the guy—Bellamy—trace the edges of their invisible leash, which spans about seven feet. Completely dressed, of course. (She feels infinitely better with _many_ layers of clothes between them.) Their chosen method of measurement is full-throated shouting, followed by failed attempts to storm off, and more shouting. The more they fight it, the more it hurts.

Clarke’s read about proximity curses before, but experiencing one is an entirely different matter. It’s like there’s an invisible wire wrapped around her, through her, threatening to cut through her if she pushes too hard. Sitting there on the couch, watching Bellamy wear tracks into her floor, she can’t help but remember all the cases of proximity curses or binding spells gone wrong. The couple that had their organs ripped out because one couldn’t bear to let her lover get drafted. The human who was trapped in a mine collapse and the witch who starved because she could not (and would not) leave his side. She refuses to die like that.

“It’d be great if your buddy could hurry up,” Bellamy says petulantly. He hasn’t stopped pacing, his expression tense and irritated.

“Places to be?” Clarke retorts. He looks at her darkly. He’d sent a series of texts earlier, mood souring with every ping of his phone, and Clarke guesses he has someone waiting for him.

“Don’t worry. She’s one of the most talented witches in my coven. She won’t flake.”

“Which coven?” he asks flatly.

She says, with mild reluctance, “Griffin.”

He stops pacing, and she catches the all-too-familiar look of recognition that flickers across his face. She hates that. “Huh,” he says. “You really are a high-society witch.”

She gives him the dirtiest look she can manage. “Shut up,” she replies.

He resumes pacing. “You’re an elemental, right?” he asks abruptly.

She frowns, because almost every witch is. “Yeah,” she says. “Water. You?”

His back is to her when he answers, “Persuasive.”

She gapes at him open-mouthed. Male witches are rare in the first place. There’s only a handful mentioned in the entire history of witchcraft, all of them outcasts who eventually crashed and burned. Sometimes literally. She’s known one in her lifetime and Wells didn’t exactly deviate from the norm. But charmers? Those are…even rarer. She runs through the night in her head, fear prickling in her throat.

“I didn’t use it tonight,” he says, as if reading her thoughts. He’s not looking at her. There’s a dark smear of blood on the collar of his shirt where he must have wiped his mouth.

She chooses, in this moment, to believe him. “It’s dangerous for people like you to be covenless,” she says. She’s referring to a time when charmers—those witches with power in their words—were hunted down like animals. It’s not hard to find them; people flock to them like moths to a flame.

“I manage."

“You shouldn’t have even told me your affinity,” Clarke points out.

His mouth tightens. “I don’t really see you as a threat, princess,” is all he says.

Clarke scoffs and turns away from him, pulling her knees close and resting her chin atop them. She stews for about another twenty minutes of agonizing silence, enduring the feeling of growing tautness under her rips, before another sharp tug makes her snap.

_"Will you stop doing that?"_

Across the room, Bellamy stops resisting; the invisible wire goes slack as if dropped abruptly. He's now about a foot closer to her than before, his knee inches from the coffee table. He's breathing hard. "It's getting worse," he says petulantly.

"Yes, thank you," Clarke says shortly.

"I don't see you trying anything," he snaps.

"I'd rather keep my organs intact," she shoots back. He apparently has no response for this and settles for glaring. Mildly pleased, she checks her phone again, but no notifcations await her. It's three in the morning. She sighs. "Raven's probably passed out by now," she says reluctantly. Her eyelids feel heavy and sore. Long gone is the pleasant buzz from the bar. "Look, I just want to crash."

"And what am I supposed to do?"

"I really don't give a fuck." The silence after this statement almost makes her feel bad. She sighs again, rubs her eyelids. "Look, I just want to crash. Can I get in my bed?"

He blinks. "It's your bed."

He follows with some reluctance as she starts for her bedroom. He hovers uncomfortably at the doorway, shuffling forward a couple of steps when she yanks him. She can feel the uncertainty in his eyes as she flops onto the covers. "Where—?"

"Get in, for all I care." She turns her back to him. After another minute of silence, she feels the other side of the mattress dip slowly. For the first time in a few hours, her insides aren't twisted into a knot. As if sensing the temporary nature of this relief, she slips almost immediately into the dark.

She wakes up at a ragged time, which is unusual for her.

She’s a girl of precise risings—six-thirty, seven o’clock, eight-fifteen—and feels put-off on the rare days that she wakes between them. Bellamy is already awake, propped against the headboard and scrolling through his phone.

“Finally,” he says.

Clarke frowns at the clock—nine-seventeen—and says irritably, “Why didn’t you wake me up?” He blinks, as if the option hadn’t even occurred to him. In the following silence Clarke decides to let it go. “How far is it now?” she asks.

“I can get halfway to the door,” he replies. She eyes the distance. Closer to four feet now.

They shuffle into the kitchen, nearly bumping into each other in the process. They eat cereal in silence. Well, would-be silence. Bellamy’s phone keeps pinging, over and over. Frowning, he flicks off the ringer.

“Girlfriend?” Clarke asks.

His eyes flash up to hers. She’s taken aback by how offended he looks, but the emotion passes as quickly as it comes. “Sister,” he mutters. He doesn’t offer up any more information. But he does say, “You live alone.”

Clarke raises an eyebrow. “Yes.”

“You’re a Griffin witch,” he says. “And you live alone.”

Clarke stirs her coffee remotely with a finger, willing the water to take over the clumps of creamer that stick to the side of the mug. “I’m not hearing a question.”

He huffs. “_Why_ do you live alone?”

It’s the number-one rule. Coven means power. _Proximity_ means power. Just not too much proximity, clearly. “Because I can,” she says after a second. “Why are you alone?”

He scowls. “I’m not,” he says.

“Right. Your sister,” Clarke says. She sips from her mug. “Two witches do not a coven make.” She sounds, even to herself, alarmingly like her mother. Shaking that horrible thought, she continues, “If you don’t have elders or access to ancestral magic, what do you have?”

He doesn’t answer, and she lets it drop. She acknolwedges that she's maybe being a little bit of a dick about this.

They take turns showering. The only way it works is if one of them stands at the very edge of the shower and the other sits outside pressed up against the door. Figuring this out takes time and a lot of fumbling. He almost yanks her out of the tub twice before they find the right footing. Clarke zips through her shower procedure, wipes away steam on the mirror to check the inside of her lip. Typically, she wouldn’t even have a mark where she bit herself. But she still has a scabbed-over sore that bleeds again when she messes with it. She dabs at it with a square of toilet paper and scowls at her reflection. “Fucker,” she mutters.

When she checks her phone, there's a flurry of messages from Raven. Clarke immediately calls her.

"Where have you been?" she demands, wrapping herself in a towel.

"I just woke up," Raven says in a supremely hungover voice. "What the fuck did you do?"

Clarke plops onto the bathroom floor. "I have no idea," she moans. "I don't know why I didn't sense him."

"That _is_ weird," Raven murmurs. Clarke can hear life returning to her voice. Just hearing the familiar cadence of it relaxes her. There's rustling over the line as Raven rolls out of bed. "I'm going to call Monty. Did you check the Google drive already?"

"No," Clarke admits. "To be honest, I forgot it existed." The email invitation to their communal magical research folder is probably still lost somewhere in her spam folder. When Raven makes a disapproving noise, Clarke says defensively, "I'm not a magic nerd."

"Okay, well if you were, you wouldn't have cursed yourself accidentally."

She has an incredible itch to tell Raven to fuck off but resists on the grounds that it probably isn't in her best interests right now. As if reading her mind, Raven hums triumphantly. _"Alright,"_ Clarke says irritably. "Just call me back when you get something."

Bellamy emerges from her bathroom in a cloud of steam just as she hangs up. "Anything?"

Clarke rubs her temples. "She's going to call me back." She turns her back pointedly on his look of annoyance. "Can we put on some fucking clothes now?"

They eat more cereal for lunch, don’t talk about how the thing tethering them together is getting shorter. Someone calls Bellamy near noon and he answers reluctantly, keeping his answers short and clipped because Clarke is sitting on the other end of the couch staring at the wall pointedly. Raven had already texted her with the results of her search.

(3:44 PM) Raven: Monty + I agree. You performed the wrong ritual.

(3:45 PM) Clarke: Fuck

(3:45 PM) Raven: Yeah

(3:46 PM) Raven: You didn't bound yourselves to the earth, you bound yourselves to each other

(3:46 PM) Clarke: What the fuck does that mean

(3:47 PM) Raven: Should wear off after 24hrs. Or you die. RIP.

(3:48 PM) Clarke: Get fucked

(3:48 PM) Raven: ;)

Showing the conversation to Bellamy produced his blackest mood yet. He'd handed it back silently, expression stony. Clarke had nothing to say either.

A sharp ringing noise rips through the silence and Bellamy practically dives for his phone.

“Later,” he says in a low voice. There’s a murmur of noise as the other person responds. “No, I can’t… I said _later_.” He hangs up.

Clarke doesn’t say anything. It’s now been fifteen hours. She has never hated magic more than she does right now.

“Can we please,” she says, with growing desperation, “stop watching National Geographic?”

He has his feet—his _feet_—on her coffee table. He refuses to use a coaster. The remote is firmly in his right hand. She hates him. It’s unbelievable that she thought he was hot last night.

“No,” he says, eyes firmly on the screen.

“It’s my TV,” she reminds him.

He turns dark eyes on her, full of impatience where they were full of charm. “If I’m going to spend nine more hours cooped up with a one-night stand, I’m going to watch fucking National Geographic.”

She starts to retort, but he turns up the volume.

She wakes up uncomfortably warm.

She lifts her head. Fucking National Geographic is still going on. More importantly, the distance between her and Bellamy is now virtually non-existent. He’s pressed right up against her, head tipped back and mouth slightly open. He snores. She jerks back abruptly and he snaps awake with a snort.

“Got shorter,” he mutters in bleary explanation. He turns his face away without waiting for a reply.

Clarke scoots away from him and realizes he’s right. That invisible wire is there, taut and threatening. She leans back. “What happens if it doesn’t fade?” she murmurs. On the TV meerkats are running through a field. Someone British is narrating about their little, insignificant lives.

“We die screaming,” Bellamy says, but clearly he doesn’t believe that. He’s got his arms crossed tightly, and there’s a sheen of sweat on his forehead. Clarke wonders how long he resisted moving closer to her.

She sits up slowly. They’re practically in each other’s laps; hip to hip, knee to knee. Somewhere between the show about the Amazon and the one about space, it got dark. He hadn’t bothered to turn on the light— but maybe he can’t reach it.

“I can’t believe I’m going to die because of you,” she says.

He snorts. “Me? This is _your_ fault.”

She glares. “You’re the one who didn’t bother to check who you were fucking,” she snaps.

“Oh, yeah, because that’s something you say to a girl in a bar,” he shoots back. “_By the way, I’m a witch looking for a human component to an ancient ritual I need to continue being a witch._”

“Or,” Clarke hisses, “you _physically_ check. Like _this._” She puts her hands on either side of his face, forcing him to feel the full strength of the magic under her skin. He pulls away from the jolt, mouth going slack, and Clarke feels it, too—like when you touch metal and the static shocks you. His hands are on her wrists like he’s going to push her off but he pulls instead, and then he’s kissing her. It’s too easy to slide into his lap.

She will probably regret this, but at this point—tugging at the button on Bellamy’s jeans while he mouths over her collarbone, fits a hand into her sleep shorts—she doesn’t really care. The thing pulling them together makes her forget that technically he’s the wrong fuck. The hilariously wrong kind. Fuck it.

A mutual orgasm later and Bellamy rasps, “Fuck."

Clarke rolls off him. She’s sweating and there’s a spot on her neck that will definitely be a hickey later. It pulses with her racing heartbeat, painful and delicious at the same time. “Not dead,” she pants.

“Yeah,” he says. His voice is the throaty, breathy kind that makes her shiver. She presses her knees together.

There’s a moment of stationary silence while their breathing slows down. The pressure, the invisible wire around Clarke’s middle, is gone. She stands up experimentally. When she takes a step away, Bellamy starts to say something, but falls silent, because nothing happens. She huffs out a laugh.

“Yeah,” he says again. “This’ll be one to tell at the dinner table.”

They test it first, walking first the length of her living room and then standing at far corners of her apartment. For a second, they forget that they really, really don’t like each other. They go back to the front room. He reaches for his jacket.

“Where are you going?” she asks, startled.

He frowns at her. She realizes what she said, flushes pink. “I’m going home,” he says.

“I didn’t mean…” She stops. “We should exchange information,” she says. “Just in case.”

He huffs, “I don’t think so.” He stuffs his feet in his shoes. To Clarke it seems a clear statement that he’s going to pretend none of this ever happened. He steps towards the door and she follows.

“But there could be long-term effects,” Clarke reminds him. “Repercussions.”

“I know where you live,” he says, and that doesn’t make her feel as uneasy as it should.

“Are you stupid?” she asks.

“I’m tired,” he shoots back.

They stand for a minute, awkward. There’s not much she can do. “Then may we never meet again,” she says, a half-joke that falls sort of flat.

He’s finishing pulling on his biker jacket. She wishes intensely that it looked stupid on him. He looks at her mussed hair and inside-out sweater and nods. “May we never meet again,” he agrees.

She watches him go, lean muscle and bone wrapped in denim and leather, and wonders if the old gods have it out for her.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm diradea on tumblr.


End file.
